From a software developer's point of view, the user interface of a stabilized or legacy product or service is not an attractive investment for redesign or modification. Thus it is common for customers to struggle with diverse ways to configure a mixture of systems having many common settings and parameters. Of course, next generation products have capabilities and controls unanticipated when designing the previous product line. Even products and service which serve different missions often have some common settings. Consider the various ways to reset time after a power failure in kitchen appliances, computers, phones, televisions, digital recording devices, alarm clocks, and motor vehicles.
This impacts time to market for new products as well as ease of adoption and maintenance for customers of many products.
Furthermore many products and services change their allowed commands and parameters from release to release and version to version. However, some parameters remain the same across versions and even across product families. It is tedious to individually configure multiple devices that differ in minor ways. It is also labor intensive to set the same or similar parameters for dissimilar products and services. Moreover, when new products or services are released, a gating factor is updating its user interface or making them consistent and easy to use with other products. What is needed is a way to set similar parameters in diverse products without learning different reinvented user interfaces for the same functionality. Furthermore similarities and dissimilarities among diverse products should be easily discoverable and, if desired, brought into coherence.